The exploding popularity and sophistication of the internet has brought to bear easy access for anyone or any entity to publish, consume and aggregate content. Along with an explosion of content, the rate of appearance of advertisements that accompany content (and serve to monetize the content) is growing at a similar pace. Internet advertising supports a large and sophisticated ecosystem of participants including publishers, content providers, ad networks, ad agencies, ad aggregators, and ad arbitragers.
Some of the participants are more technologically savvy than others, and understand the inner workings of an ad network. In contrast, some of the participants have more marketing savvy than others, but do not necessarily understand the inner workings of ad placement. Highly effective internet advertising demands high performance from the network as well as high performance (e.g. high performance in the form of clicks or conversions) from the population to which the advertisement is targeted. However, in some situations, higher-performing advertisements (e.g. using video, animations, pop-ups, dynamically assembled targeted ad content, etc) might demand ad network resources to such an extent that the user experience suffers.
For example, an advertisement placement that is dynamically assembled using multiple network locations for content might require a long time to assemble and, in the meantime, the user is waiting for the destination page to be fully rendered on his/her terminal. The problem is exacerbated when considering aspects of the aforementioned ecosystem, and in particular that advertisement placement involves not only a content publisher (e.g. Disney.com) and an ad network (e.g. yahoo.com), but also may include any number of third parties (e.g. ad agencies, ad aggregators, ad arbitragers, etc), any of which third parties may not be so technologically sophisticated as pertains to the inner workings of internet advertising such that the third-party produces a high-performing ad.
There exist many techniques for reducing the dynamic assembly time, however it remains to be known which advertisement placements require a long time to assemble. Thus, for this reason and other reasons, there exists a need for measuring inline ad performance for third-party ad serving.